I adored my 64, my Commodore 64

When I was a kid, the whole personal computer phenomenon was just beginning to arrive on the scene. I was fascinated by computers, and when the Commodore 64 eventually came down in price, my parents bought us one.

After that, it was difficult to part me from my beloved Commodore 64. I played with it, hacked it, and programmed it (we used to type programs in using code printed in magazines back then). Eventually, I managed to get my tape drive upgraded to a floppy disk drive, and added a 300 baud modem. I got involved in the local BBS scene (bulletin board systems — the precursor to the modern Internet), and also ran my own BBS off and on over the years.

There are actually quite a number of good friends in my life whom I first developed relationships with through a common interest in the Commodore 64 and BBSes. The impact of the Commodore 64 (and later Amiga) on my life is definitely substantial. In fact, my main passion and source of income these days is web design, and that’s really not that far removed from the BBS “SysOp” role I had in the 80s. (At the risk of sounding un-humble, I always strived to have the best “looking” BBS in town, considering the limitations of ASCII text art.) That Commodore BBS “country road” eventually merged with the PC Internet “superhighway”, and now that computer usage which was just a fringe geeky thing is now completely mainstream and used by most people every day. Back then I knew that it should happen, but I’m still often surprised that it did. It’s a laugh to think about how back then, most people thought even the Commodore 64 was unfathomably complex to understand — and yet now they all use Microsoft Windows, something exponentially harder to fathom!

All of this is on my mind a lot lately because I just finished reading On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, which came highly recommended by Warren. It was a gripping page-turner for me — and if you ever owned a Commodore computer you might be as fascinated by this book as I was.

The Commodore company has been largely relegated to “footnote” status in the modern history of computing. It’s really unjust and inaccurate, but I guess history is written by the victors. For example, nowadays, it seems like Apple would like to re-write history and give itself more credit than it deserves. Although you rarely hear anyone talk about Commodore’s importance in computing history, the fact is the 80s was really the era of Commodore, and the early computers by Apple and Atari actually used chips manufactured by Commodore; which is something I wasn’t aware of back then. (In fact, Steve Jobs even tried to sell his Apple company to Commodore at one point, but Commodore didn’t think it had any value — and it truthfully didn’t at the time.)

I can’t tell you how many times during the reading of the book I had to actually put it down slowly and close my eyes, thinking, “Oh my God, how could they be so stupid?” Here’s an example: Commodore releases the revolutionary Amiga computer, which features graphics and sound so advanced that it would be almost a decade before the competition could match it, as well as the first true multitasking processors. (At the time, the Apple Macintosh — now considered the “artsy” multimedia computer of choice for graphic designers — still only displayed in black-and-white, for Pete’s sake!) Well, how does Commodore market this revolutionary cutting edge multimedia computer? With magazine ads featuring black-and-white historical photographs! The fools!

There are countless other examples of “what went wrong”, and so many moments in history where Commodore was right on the edge of totally dominating the entire computer market — if only they could have gotten their act together! With one or two different decisions on Commodore’s part, you would still be using a Commodore computer right now, IBM would be a footnote, and Apple hardly remembered at all…! Really interesting stuff. Well, to me at least…

I still go back and play those old computer games with my kids. When they were little, I soldered a chip into my old Xbox which allowed me to load a Commodore 64 and Amiga emulator onto it — that lets us play my old games on the big TV from the comfort of the couch. (When they were little, it was easier for them to understand and enjoy those simple 2D games than the modern ones, which are all 3D and much harder to control.) They’re old enough now to say “my dad’s a computer geek,” and we always laugh together when they do.

Here’s what my first computer looked like. Yes, a cassette recorder was used to store programs. The text of this post would have taken more than a tenth of my Commodore 64’s available memory, and less than half of this photo could have fit in it.